Tag: Fandom

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It was nothing but a guess – pure speculation and my opinion – and nothing more. Now, many outlets have picked up the “story” and have run it as either me claiming it to be fact or me claiming it’s “inside info/rumor.”

BULLSH*T! I get that people are anxious for BvS news, but this was ridiculous!

The man behind yesterday’s ridiculous “What if all of Wonder Woman’s Amazon’s race were actually Kryptonians like Superman?” rumor tells the Internet that they should be able to recognize rumor when they see it.

The online reaction to this story was fascinating and depressing – it essentially amounted to “Of course I don’t believe it but I can IMAGINE it being done, so I’ll get mad anyway as if it HAD been done!” which is crazy making, to put it mildly.

2013 felt like a year when fan entitlement in response to things published/filmed/etc. became an accepted, even planned-upon part of mainstream conversation. Will 2014 be the year when we see entitlement based entirely on misunderstandings and preconceptions follow suit?

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Outsider Art

Think of it this way. These non-fans, the ones who haven’t decided whether they’re going to see your sequel. What if Regular Joe Non-nerd comes up to me and says, “I liked the first Trek movie all right. What’s this new one about?” I DON’T KNOW, REGULAR JOE NON-NERD, BECAUSE J.J. ABRAMS WON’T FUCKING TELL US. This is not something that will tantalize Joe into pre-ordering tickets. He’s just going to wait until someone can tell him what the premise is.

We can’t do that without a name, and here’s the crazy part — the name barely matters! If I could tell Joe “The Enterprise crew fights Gary Mitchell/Harry Mudd/The Mugatu/Whoever” — the actual name barely matters. The names won’t mean anything to regular people anyway. But it’ll still be a hell of a lot more interesting than “The Enterprise crew fights… somebody.”

From here.

I am becoming oddly obsessed with the sense of entitlement and indignation that’s becoming more and more apparent in nerd culture. There is so much to unpick from this above quote, whether it’s the panic at the idea that – by not confirming fan speculation that the bad guy in a movie is someone familiar to the nerd audience – JJ Abrams is somehow preventing them from looking forward to the movie, the notion that not revealing the entire plot of a movie that doesn’t even come out for half a year is somehow selfish, or my favorite, the anger at being removed from the position of information gatekeeper for the non-nerd audience. “Regular Joe Non-Nerd” along is just amazing. Talk about self-otherization.

This is from a piece called “Dear JJ Abrams, Just @#$%ing Tell Us Who Benedict Cumberbatch Is Playing In Star Trek 2 Already,” by the way.

I’ve pitched something to Time about this; it might not be all there yet, but I’m hoping it’s something I can pull together nonetheless.